Revisiting the “Cookieless Domain” Recommendation | Hacker News Reader

Revisiting the “Cookieless Domain” Recommendation

jonathanklein.net

145 pointsluu66 comments

Separate domains for CSS and images files are primarily intended to overcome certain (old?) browsers' limitation on the number of concurrent connections to a single domain [1][2]. Cookieless domains can only help you if you have supermassive cookies. Keep those to a special subdomain, if you really need to have them. But you probably don't.

There is no one rule of thumb for performance. Generally, inline everything that's small enough to inline. If it's big enough such that caching a separate file will help you on subsequent page loads, then put it in a separate file.

Test and measure. If you can't measure the difference, it doesn't matter. If you don't measure the difference, the rule you are following probably isn't helping you.

[1] http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2013/09/05/domain-sharding-...

[2] http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2008/03/20/roundup-on-paral...

> Test and measure. If you can't measure the difference, it doesn't matter. If you don't measure the difference, the rule you are following probably isn't helping you.

/Yes/.

That's a sad state of affairs for our industry, though. It's like every structural engineer being told to measure which is stronger, iron or steel. How about some basic shared knowledge we can all trust and build on?

There may yet come a day when all steel is sold by weight, manufactured in unnamed factories at unknown chemical compositions such that the only way to know if a piece of steel you have will carry the weight being asked of it, is to use a sample of it in a test fixture.

Unfortunately that day is already today on the Internet, where browsers have unknown design decisions made of unknown reasoning across networks that were optimized for unknown requirements.

It's more like what's cheaper, diesel or gasoline? Well, it depends on your mileage and the prices...

How about some basic shared knowledge we can all trust and build on?

We have decades of it, it's so trusted that you're forgetting it even exists. What we don't have are convenient answers for questions at the edge of predictability involving dozens of constantly-moving variables.

You can get italics using *.

Most modern browsers are limited to 6 connections per hostname[0] (IE is an exception), and usually there are many more than 6 images/assets, so separate domains still make sense.

[0] http://www.browserscope.org/?category=network

Measure it. Not necessarily. Massively parallel TCP is not great. In lining is much better for tiny images.

Is the "flash of unstyled content" really so "dreaded"?

I've noticed it regularly on the publish side of the Google Play Store.

The chain reaction this sets off in my head is about 100 FUOC's long. And it goes something like this.

Hey, I just saw a FUOC on the Google Play store admin!

They must not be optimizing CSS delivery for above-the-fold content... [0]

Or maybe they just don't lavish the same resources on admin sites as they do on front-end...

I mean, did anyone else see that? And what if they did? What would they think? They wouldn't think anything, because only a web developer would even recognize a FOUC...

And even if someone else saw it and recognized it for what it was... so what?

If I tried to explain to someone what happened in that moment, that Google, yes, Google had failed to expend all the necessary brain power on ensuring that their markup was not rendered a fraction of a second before their stylesheets were parsed...

And that people actually care about that, actually want to protect users from that horrid sight...

I would be seen for what I am, which is a madman.

[0] https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/OptimizeCS...

I use a lot of high latency connections (my country has rather slow ping times to major internet centres - around 200ms) and sometimes connections just get "stuck" when loading the CSS.

This results in seeing the title of the page with a loading spinner and a blank white page. If browsers actually rendered the page (is CSS really that important on a news site?) I would at least be able to see the content.

I have the same problem with my internet. So many times have I given up waiting and just hit cmd+u to view page source and read the info I want in raw html.

Paranoia over the FOUC is the bane of my web browsing days. Any time you use unstable internet (hostels in poor countries), designers' prude paranoia over their naked content being shown without the proper styling or font, it ruins modern web browsing. I stopped timing when every other page I saw was literally > 1 minute of waiting. Started using view-source: to just read the damn content.

Please, for the love of God, stop hiding content behind styles. Please. Please please please.

i'm personally fairly irked about the massive shift towards "cdn all the things!", i have noscript blocking third-party assets and a larger number of sites is broken for me every day.

rather than cdns, there should be an sha or md5 hash sent with every asset, like an etag, so that things need not live on a specific domain to be pulled from cache.

EDIT: those downvoting, care to state your case?

I've wanted something like that. The main problem is security: find a hash collision, magic XSS.

though you could say this about any system that uses hashing. if sha256 or 512 is used, the likelihood of collisions with other functioning code, especially code that would yield useful xss seems impossibly small.

Better yet, use multiple hashes. Finding a simultaneous collision in sha256 and md5 seems pretty unlikely.

No. This is bad advice, do not do this; it comes up every time there's a problem with a hash algorithm. The equivalent number of bits in a hashing algorithm designed as such (e.g. sha-384) will be substantially more secure than sha256+md5.

That's not the point.

The point is that you don't want to stand on only one leg when a flaw in that leg may be discovered in the future.

Admittedly MD5 was a poor example from me in that light...

A more realistic mix might be: sha256+RIPEMD160+Whirlpool.

Or, in crypto-speak: Concatenating outputs from multiple hash functions provides collision resistance as good as the strongest of the algorithms included in the concatenated result. [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_hash_function#Con...

Even a very serious attack against SHA-512 would be unlikely to render it as weak as RIPEMD-160 (compare even e.g. MD4, which is pretty thoroughly broken but the attacks still take compute time). If you have the bits, it's better to spend them on a longer hash rather than more hashes.

Even a very serious attack against SHA-512 would

What makes you think you can predict the consequences of an attack against SHA-512?

Don't put all your eggs in one basket.

> What makes you think you can predict the consequences of an attack against SHA-512?

70 years of cryptographic history.

> Don't put all your eggs in one basket.

Don't use cryptographic primitives in ways they weren't designed for. That's a surefire recipe for disaster.

That's a non problem if you use a cryptographically sound hashing algorithm. If someone can find collisions to sha3, they can do a lot more damage than xss.

Edit: just reread the GP and saw that they said the content should be able to come from a cache of a different domain. You're right, hash collision there would be bad (as others had mentioned you'd want something with a low chance if collision construction).

How does this introduce a new XSS issue? It's no different from the current system. And in this case the hash isn't being used to verify the content, it's there for cache invalidation.

I guess someone could poison your local cache somehow, and maybe that could be a problem with shared cdns. But there are other mechanisms to make sure you're delivered the right content in the first instance.

I think the main issues are actually browser support and having to deal with it in your own framework / code. That's the point people start saying - you know what, the existing system works well enough, I'll jut crank up the expiry on my existing headers and stick a cache buster in the URL when it needs to change.

The downvotes are probably because you are complaining sites are broken when you install something that intentionally breaks them.

Your CDN alternative is not clear (to me at least).

NoScript doesn't do general-purpose blocking of resources from third-party domains- it only handles blocking scripts and objects like Flash. So if a site won't load when NoScript is active, it's because the site is not delivering any viewable content through the initial request, just scripts which then go on to request the actual content. Such sites are obviously not optimizing for latency, and are also accessibility nightmares.

As for the cookie concerns: first-time visitors don't have any cookies to be sending. Regular users have a cached copy of your stylesheet. Someone who hasn't been to your site in months probably won't have a cached stylesheet, and if you're worried about the performance impact of cookies for them, then just consider whether that cost is worth paying for whatever benefit you're getting by setting long-lived cookies for users who didn't come back soon after their previous visit.

I think the CDN alternative would be:

Site 1 sends <script src="/foo/jquery.js" hash="SHA3:12345...">. Your browser hasn't cached this file, so it downloads jquery.js, verifies the hash and caches the contents. Site 2 sends <script src="/bar/jquery-2.5.js hash="SHA3:12345...">. The browser finds that the hash matches the cached jquery.js and loads that instead of downloading the script again.

The scripts could still be served from CDNs, but it wouldn't have to be the same one to have a cache hit. Popular libraries like jQuery would have so many hits that a CDN might not even be worth the effort. Actually the concept is so simple, it's surprising that this hasn't already been implemented unless there is a security issue that I'm not seeing.

I don't know if it's a big issue, but if you know the SHA3 of some files on other websites, you could use that to know where the user has been or not. For example, you add a file that you know is specific to Facebook <script src="/js/somefakefile.js" hash="SHA3:FACEBOOKHASH..."> If a user don't download /js/somefakefile.js, you know they have visited Facebook at some point.

You can already do this with a timing attack. Use js to add a script tag with http://facebook.com/js/somefakefile.js to the page, and time how long it takes to load. If it's in cache it will be much faster.

So not understanding a comment is a common reason to downvote? Interesting.

Yes I think so, plus jokes/sarcasm doesn't go down well (unless you are funny which face it most of us aren't).

And apparently, even discussing jokes/sarcasm can get you through the shades of grey.

There's an emerging standard for specifying a hash for a resource, and potentially loading it from one of several locations, so long as it matches the given hash: http://www.w3.org/TR/SRI/

That's a very good idea. There's more stuff in that TR than is strictly necessary, but the basic idea is

    <a href="https://example.com/file.zip"
     integrity="ni:///sha256;  
     skjdsfkafinqfb...ihja_gqg?
     ct=application/octet-stream"
     download>Download!</a>

That provides integrity checking without encryption. It also helps with caching - rather than expiration times, cache systems can use the hash. If you already have a copy of jquery in cache and it matches the hash, it doesn't matter where it came from.

Perhaps a silly idea / question, but could browsers support some kind of an optimization meta tag that tells to fetch the resource without sending cookies? something like `<img src="..." data-no-cookies=true>` or even a directive that applies to all static resources unless specified otherwise, e.g. `<meta no-cookies-for="jpg;css;js">` ??

In HTTP/2 (SPDY) the only headers that need to be sent are ones that changed since the last request on the connection. So once that is more common you'll actually be better off just attaching the cookies to all requests since that will mean they only get sent once per TCP connection.

I've been suggesting a move towards HTTPS only (for security) with SPDY/HTTP2 support.. for my own usage, 2/3 of the clients support SPDY... so having more resources from the initial domain is a better win.. with PUSH resources for CSS/JS with initial connection it gets better still.

If ES6 (including modules) were supported in browser, it would be pretty awesome as an addition to SPDY... I think we're reasonably 5-6 years off before any broadly available sites can really use it, but it's cool. Similar compared to Web Sockets a few years back.

Given that a lot of interactive data is now pushed to dedicated API services, and images are offloaded for CDN, it's far easier to deliver CSS and JS with the markup on the same deployment(s).

Great post by Jonathan. For the case of a big 'single page' JS app where a most of the rendering happens from Javascript fetched on the page, I'd guess this approach won't help that much since you have to fetch the JS from the CDN/cookieless domain anyways. Still though, definitely worth an experiment to know for sure.

> For the case of a big 'single page' JS app where a most of the rendering happens from Javascript fetched on the page, I'd guess this approach won't help that much since you have to fetch the JS from the CDN/cookieless domain anyways.

If you're taking that approach, you probably don't care much about performance anyways (I've never seen a pure JS SPA which rendered fast).

FastMail begs to differ: http://blog.fastmail.com/2014/12/15/dec-15-putting-the-fast-...

Loads & renders in between 0.5-1.0s.

(Though I must say FastMail is rather unique in this regard.)

Reminds me of the time, 2 or 3 years ago, when Google announced that every page which would take more than 300ms to load and render would be downranked in the search.

Seems like we’re going backwards...

try http://hn.premii.com/ - Even though it relies on 3rd party for data (backend), it loads quickly.

If you have a control over backend, you can optimize it further.

I've always shirked away from a separate "cookie-less domain" in favor of cookie-less sub-domains (think costs and SSL). This does require you to think about www/no-www (cookie-less sub-domains require you to limit the cookies to the www sub-domain, as no-www means that *.domain inherit all cookies). I wonder if this is still relevant in the HTTP2/SPDY world?

If you terminate SSL at the CDN, if you don't own the network and CDN, won't that leave your data open while in-transit between the CDN and the app servers?

I'm using cloudfront and aws, reluctant to let cloudfront be the root CDN because of this. Anyone got any insight?

Is there a reason your CDN couldn't talk to your backend via SSL too?

No reason, but does that help? I suppose it might, if the CDN used a keepalive connection and had less hops to go over.

If your visitors are using HTTPS to talk to you CDN, then you almost certainly should be using HTTPS from CDN to origin.

Can't speak for Cloudfront, but I do know that Cloudflare has mitigated this problem. When you set up SSL, you have the option to force SSL from end to end. Of course, this approach means that SSL is terminated twice, once at the CDN and again when the user receives it, and this also relies on the assumption that you can trust Cloudflare with your data as it passes through their internal network.

CloudFront can do this easily: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/Developer...

I don't trust this analysis. There's no clear mechanism for why forcing the CSS to the same domain would speed things up. Also, the comparison doesn't truly isolate the same-domain/different-domain decision as the cause of any slowdown. Perhaps, the test server is simply less-loaded/less-laggy/network-closer to his measurement browser... so it's the move fo the CSS to that server, not the unification of source domains, that causes the measured speedup. Or many other things.

Loading CSS from the same domain speeds things up for a couple of reasons:

1. No DNS look up for the second host 2. Many browsers speculatively open a second TCP connection to the original host in anticipation that another request will be made so the TCP negotiation overhead for the second request moves forward 3. CSS is on the critical path for rendering so getting it more quickly improves rendering time

I think a much more interesting concept is prefetching files. Load the link to content with some of the critical files it needs to download, so that the browser can start downloading them before resolving the link.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Link_prefe...

What do you guys think of having the absolute minimum page with inlined everything (even images) that just shows a simple progress bar - it loads the rest of CSS/JS/whatever.

I've done it once for a large front end app, and it worked pretty well - the user gets an almost instant webpage and sees that the stuff is loading.

You are duplicating the 'loading' indicators in the browser.

It helps mobile users determine if their connection is simply slow or completely timed out.

If I don't see even a loading screen, I assume my connection is bad and reload, instead of giving it a bunch of time to load absolutely everything.

Only works if you can play tetris while you wait

Gmail greats us with a loading indicator like that.

I would greatly prefer you make websites that don't require progress bars.

Browser progress bars are hardly reliable though.

IE's can get to ~80% before a single byte is received.

I'd prefer if it had text I could read while I'm waiting for your 1000x1000 background image to load.

Ok it has been done(!) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8816152

One issue is that you should not use any compression (http or tls) on a request/response with any sensitive info, such as session ids or csrf tokens (see beast, crime attacks).

It's easy to turn off compression on your www domain and turn it on on your cdn domain.

So now you're not compressing your css, which would slow the response time, but by how much I can't say. You could still use css minification.

you're confusing content compression with header compression. it's fine to pre-gzip your css before serving it over http or tls.

HTTP compression is simply not safe on your main web domain: http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/20406/is-http-co...

What I was trying to say is that, if you're security conscious, and running a CDN anyway, it might not be worth the risk to allow (selective) HTTP compression on your main web domain. It would be safer to disable it completely.

> Here’s the rub: when you put CSS (a static resource) on a cookieless domain, you incur an additional DNS lookup and TCP connection before you start downloading it. Even worse, if your site is served over HTTPS you spend another 1-2 round trips on TLS negotiation

Unless you're using SPDY, using a different domain doesn't add any more TLS overhead than using the same domain, right? I didn't think that browsers reuse connections to the same server.

>Unless you're using SPDY, using a different domain doesn't add any more TLS overhead than using the same domain, right? I didn't think that browsers reuse connections to the same server.

This isn't new to SPDY: HTTP/1.1 has keep-alive.

You're right, I was confusing keep-alive with pipelining, which browsers typically don't support.

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